The Return to childhood

Or, that’s what I felt yesterday, when my friends and I made a visit to a nearby mela, ripe with all the rides – the Well of death(the best way to translate ‘Maut Ka Kua’), the vertical giant wheel, the indomitable swingers(dont be a pervert, i am tking about a ride! lol!); the snakelady gimmick, the tantrik jadugar, the most rustic form of a casino, and to top it all, the delicious delicacies – the ones my eyes were feasting on and my tummy was craving for. What really amazes me is the randomness of the crowd, the waypeole dresses, the way they walk, and the way they interact without talking to one another. Have you have ever noticed the fact that how much the crowd maybe, the gait of one group of people always differs from another; be it in their speed of walking, the way they walk, or rhythm of their steps. Its somekind of an uncommunicated law that ensures that you are not lost amongst the crowd.

The smell of raw earth blending with the aroma of the half-baked kebabs, the mixing of people from all sections, the sight of a child convincing her parents to let her ride one of the big wheels, and the loud music and the continuous din jolted me into my past when I as a child would visit such a mela with my mother. The amazement that I then felt could now very well feels babyish but the raw emotions that now was flowing could not be substituted by any materialistic form of happyness. The stirred childhood in me brought back vivid pictures of my past experiences – nagging my mother to take me to the melas, the dilemma I used to had about what to buy but ultimately I ended up buying nothing, the magic shop which attracted me the most, the jumping bag in the shape of Mickey Mouse which never appealed to me, the pickles store which offered me free pickles to taste, the jalebi shop which was a must visit for me, the Spastic Society of India store selling cards and handicrafts where I was bewildered at how creative some people can be, the unending din which was there in the background but never seemed to bother me, the cloth stores where the ladies would be crowding at and I, as a child, would slip in through the gaps to see what was happening and then come bach with utter disappointment as it had nothing for me; and so I could go on and on . The never ending excitement of those days have now somehow been decapitated by the materialistic life that we now live in, though I make it a point to visit such places whenever time permits and I make sure that that time permits me to go and revisit these memories of childhoods. I do not know what I should term these : The Return to Innocence or the Return to Childhood. Since I have already used the first in an earlier post, I choose the second, though what I actually mean is the former.